If you're in the NGO/non-profit industry in Africa working with technology, then you may want to check out Africa Source II, the sequel to the excellent event I attended last year. The venue looks great, and how can things go wrong geeking out with your industry colleagues learning some great technology and teaching others what you're doing. I hope to be there!
The news of the day is that Mark Shuttleworth has invested R10m in local Linux distribution vendor ImpiLinux via his VC company. First off the mark with news was Tectonic last night, Business Day this morning, and the Sunday Times had an article this afternoon aimed at the more common folk.
Paul Vecchiato reports that the City of Cape Town and the State IT Agency (SITA) plan to jointly develop an open source solution ... to manage their libraries. They estimate the development costs of the project at between R3m and R4m.
Also since (internal release) 2.0.8, KnowledgeTree supports a rich permissions system. The backend can handle permissions on a per-document and per-user level, inherited or not, and with dynamic permissions (such as because of local roles) handled efficiently, even for searches.
Since 2.0.8 (an internal release), KnowledgeTree supports the concept of metadata versions of documents. The metadata version contains the combination of the contents of the document and the metadata assigned to the document.
The South African government's primary IT provider, SITA (State IT Agency) had a compulsary tender briefing last week for vendors to provide open source software and services for the next three years. The downside is that almost no-one heard about it before the compulsary briefing, so the excitement over the tender might be a bit misplaced. Brad has some theories on how to avoid missing these sorts of things in future. Brad having theories - news at 11.
The second strategy workshop for Free Knowledge Communities is now on. Personal coverage by Karl on day 1 and day 2, and there is also coverage by Tectonic .
KT on Tectonic
15 Sep
My favourite magazine, Tectonic has a story about my project, KnowledgeTree. Of course, I'd rather people become interested in KnowledgeTree after KT3 is out so they can avoid the rough edges that have been smoothed in it...
Sidney (Newdog)
15 Sep
Wonderdog extraordinaire Dante now has his own pet, Sidney. Also known as "Newdog", Sidney is a 9 week old Staffordshire Terrier/Labrador cross we discovered through a friend of Jeremy's. Dante seems to have overcome his worry over her size, and seems to enjoy playing with her by landing on her mid-dash or crashing into her mis-dash.
Creative Commons SA news
08 Sep
The South African chapter of Creative Commons has been busy. Today they announced that they have launched ccMixterSA in conjunction with the Go Open Source campaign, which equips contestants with samples that they can remix to form their own works.